In a Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a radio resource control (RRC) status of user equipment (UE) includes a connected state and an idle state. In the idle state, the UE may receive a broadcast or paging, but does not have an RRC connection to a network side. In the connected state, the UE may perform uplink and downlink data transmission. The connected state may include: a cell dedicated channel (CELL_DCH) state, a cell forward access channel (CELL_FACH) state, a cell paging channel (CELL_PCH) state, and a UMTS terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN) registration area paging channel (URA_PCH) state.
With the wide use of intelligent mobile phones and popularization of small-sized traffic, there are increasingly more users in the CELL_FACH state and the CELL_DCH state in the UMTS. For the network side, when the UE has data to transmit, it is configured that the UE is in the CELL_FACH state or the CELL_DCH state, and when data transmission of the UE is finished, the state of the UE transits to the CELL_PCH state or the URA_PCH state, to reduce power overheads of the UE.
Currently, a radio network controller (RNC) implements state transition of the UE by using RRC signaling. The state transition method is completed by using a reconfiguration process. However, with increasingly more small-sized traffic, state transition becomes increasingly frequent. Therefore, an increase in reconfiguration processes results in an increase in signaling overheads.